


For the love of drama

by Padawan_Writer



Series: The Seasons [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: And he's totally living it, Angst, Dark Academia, Dark Academia!Reylo AU, Drama, F/M, Featuring Armitage "Wingman" Hux, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Kylo Ren is a drama queen, Sending him our apologies, Spring, Theatre, Why be ordinary when you can be dramatic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:35:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26631484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Padawan_Writer/pseuds/Padawan_Writer
Summary: Kylo and Rey were in love... before their big fight. They're both involved in their Uni's drama group: what dramatic lengths is Kylo prepared to go to to win her back?Dark Academia one-shot set in the springtime 🌸🕯📜🖋
Relationships: Armitage Hux & Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux & Rey, Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: The Seasons [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1934953
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	For the love of drama

**Author's Note:**

> The speeches in this fic indicated to be taken from the play are not my own. See end notes for citation.

Sheafs of handwritten notes and stacks of old books were spread out on Rey’s desk, lamplit and candlelit, and Rey hadn’t read a single sentence. She had a paper to write: that was the excuse she had given to the drama group to get out of rehearsal. And she did, and she had fully meant to work on it. Instead she picked the petals off a massive jug of apple blossoms, one by one, crushing each petal between her fingers and dropping it on the papers as she angrily contemplated the real reason for her avoidance of drama group.

It wasn’t as if she was needed anyway. She was only hair and makeup and this wasn’t a dress rehearsal. And a decent chance to avoid Kylo bloody Ren right now was worth any excuse.

They’d fought. She viciously tore off another petal. She’d been disappointed not to be cast in the play, especially when he’d been cast as the heartthrob Duke. He’d been stressed about some test or paper or other. They’d taken it out on each other, and she had brought up the fact that he’d be snogging Phasma and Rose _and_ Hux on stage, which touched some nerve and it all blew up from there.

But it wasn’t that that was making her angry right now. Everyone fought, they’d been upset beforehand, something else was going on. Whatever. The morning after the fight, he’d sent her a note to say sorry. Still angry, she’d ignored it. That had been the real fight. After that he’d cut her completely. Wouldn’t even make eye contact. It wounded her to the core.

This morning Rey could bear it no longer. She had swallowed her pride to send round a note to his room: “Sorry. Take back everything I said. Didn’t mean it and I love you.” scrawled in fountain pen on her best notepaper. Nothing. He hadn’t responded. It made her want to crush the merry springtime in her fingers and mash the sweet scents into the cobbles. He was treating her like she didn’t exist for him.

She wanted him back so much it hurt. There was a big Kylo-shaped hole in her life. She missed his company, their hugs, late night discussions, countryside walks, studying together, food-sharing, chess games, himself… everything he brought to her life. She had other friends, of course she did. Finn and Poe and Chewie—she had a special friendship with each of them. But none of them replaced Kylo Ren.

Outside in the dark cobbled courtyard there was a clatter and a shout. She made out the voices of the drama group returning from rehearsal.

In frustration, Rey picked up her violin and started practicing Vivaldi’s Spring again. It was meant to be a joyous piece, but now she played it aggressively, not caring if she went off key; as if Spring was attacking the world with a primeval rage, a jungle engulfing and killing all civilisation in revenge for what humans did to the planet.

There was a tap against her window. She stopped playing in confusion: her room was on the first floor*. Another tap. Someone was throwing little pieces of gravel against her window. She laid her violin and bow down on the bed and opened it. The evening spring breeze ruffled her hair. A few members of the drama group stood about in the moonlit courtyard below: it was Hux who had been trying to get her attention. She spotted Phasma who played his twin and had dyed her hair red to match his, and Poe and Finn who played the gay drunk prankster uncles. She’d been mistaken, it was a dress rehearsal and they were still in fantasy-medieval costume.

“I bring a message from my master the Duke Orsino!” Hux called up to her. A message from Kylo. She sighed, not knowing whether to be cross or a tiny bit hopeful.

“What is it?”

She immediately regretted saying that when Hux launched into his speech from the play. “I see what you are. You are too proud. Yet, if you were the devil, you are fair. My lord and master loves you. Oh such love!” He was playing the messenger telling her of the Duke’s—of Kylo’s—love for her.

Rey had sat with the script book during rehearsals enough times to know exactly what came next. Should she humour them? Was this Kylo’s way of making up? Why couldn’t he just tell her himself?

In the end her love of the drama won out over her pride. She leaned her elbows on the sill and called down, “How does he love me?”

Hux grinned. “With adorations, fertile tears, with groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire.”

“Your lord does know my mind. I cannot love him.” Which was the biggest lie she’d ever told. Perhaps she was in real danger of her pants catching fire.

Hux stopped smiling. In all seriousness he told her, “If I did love you with my master’s flame, with such a suffering, such a deadly life, in your denial I would find no sense. I would not understand it.”

Rey bit her lip. “Why, what would you?” What would you do if you loved me as he does?

“I would make me—“ Hux started, and then stopped as Kylo himself strode through the arch and into the moon lit courtyard, dressed in the magnificent black costume and cape of the Duke. Rey froze. What if Hux had just been making fun of her, and his declaration of love from the Duke hadn’t been a message of love from Kylo? He was going to be angry all over again, and so was she.

But Hux just stood aside and Kylo took over his speech with a passion and a sincerity that echoed in every word. “I would make me a willow cabin at thy gate,  
And call upon my soul within the house,  
Write loyal cantons of contemned love,  
And sing them loud even in the dead of night.  
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,  
and make the babbling gossip of the air  
Cry out, _REY!_ ” As he called her name with longing, it echoed around the courtyard. And quieter, “Oh, you should not rest between the elements of air and earth,  
But you should pity me.”

Rey didn’t understand all the words, or what they meant. But she knew that he loved her, that he would stay with her, housed in his passion, that he would write songs of his love, and that he would make the very wind spirits know her name. 

Caught in his passionate performance, she was barely able to answer with her line of consent, “…you might do much.”

From windows in dorms around the courtyard, there came a great round of applause. Rey went beetroot red at the audience, and beckoned for Kylo to come up to her.

She quickly tidied her already tidy room and relit the candles that had blown out. A moment later he knocked on her door.

She opened it. “You,” she said, “are a drama queen, Kylo Ren.”

He stood on the threshold with his head bowed and his fists clenched inside the gloves of the costume. “I know. I’m sorry, Rey.”

Rey looked at him, her Byronic hero, her opposite number, her best friend and the love of her life, who had come to her dressed in a black cape and declared his passionate love for her in true Shakespearean style. “Oh, you. I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she smiled. 

She stepped aside from the door and let Kylo come in and shut it behind him. He took off his gloves and laid them on the desk beside the door, and held out his hands to her. She took them both. For a moment they just stood and looked at each other, holding hands. Then he leaned down to kiss her, hesitating an inch from her face, searching her eyes, asking. She stood on tiptoes and closed the distance between them, letting her lips linger on his.

“I’m sorry too,” she said. “I shouldn’t have ignored your note. I was still cross. I think I was upset because I didn’t get to be in the play with you, and a bit jealous, and angry at myself for being so petty.”

“You know yourself pretty well. I wish I did,” he sighed, sitting down on her bed.

“Well I guess I have been going over every word of the argument every night for a week,” Rey smiled ruefully, moving her violin and sitting down beside him. “Are you okay? You seemed upset too.”

“I found out that Hux likes me. Like like likes me, if you know what I mean,” Kylo admitted.

“Hux is in love with you?”

“Yes, and I didn’t know what to do. I really like him but I don’t love him in that way. I love you, and I didn’t know how to tell him that. So I asked him if he would help me win you back, like the Duke and the page in the play. We stayed in costume and everything.”

Rey leaned her arm around his neck and unpinned the big black cloak. “It must have cost him a lot to do that for you.”

Kylo buried his face in his hands. “Force-damn. You’re right. I’m such a fucking horrible person, I didn’t even think.”

“That’s your problem. Mine too.”

“He must be so hurting right now. And it’s my fault. I just wreck everything.” Kylo said wretchedly.

She rubbed circles on his back. She knew she couldn’t change the way he was, only he could do that. She couldn’t condone or make light of how he behaved either. So she just said, “You will do better. And so will I. Let’s get you out of some of these ridiculous layers of costume before you wreck them and Kaydel has a fit,” and she started unbuttoning his waistcoat.

Together they fumbled at the tight little buttons, hands getting in the way of each other, his hands hot, hers cold. He scrambled out of the last button, flung it off, leaving him in his wide-sleeved loose linen shirt. She rubbed his chest and shoulder. He grabbed her face in his hands, and held it, and kissed her, and kissed her again, urgently.

She wrapped her arms around him. “Kylo!” She gasped between kisses. He drew back a couple of millimetres. “What do you need?”

“I need you, only you. You make me a better person.” He kissed her again.

“I’m not perfect though. I started all this!”

“It doesn’t matter. Only the future matters,” he said.

“You mean what we do to make up and become—“

“Who we are meant to be, yes.”

“And what’s in our future, Kylo?” She asked, looking in to his brown eyes, flicking between them.

“Us,” he whispered.

Rey’s heart stopped beating for a moment. A future. Kylo had said that they had a future. It was the first hint of long-term commitment he had ever given her. She cupped his face in her hand. “Do you mean it?”

“I mean it. I can’t imagine a future without you,” he said. “I’ve missed you.” He placed a kiss on her forehead, and then lifted her chin and kissed her softly on the lips.

“I missed you too,” she said, and moved to sit on his lap. “I want that future with us in it.” She buried her face in his neck. Here he was, solid and real and back in her life again.

Kylo held her tightly in his arms, one hand at the nape of her neck, determined never to let her go again. He’d been a fool, but the saints of drama had been kind to him. He’d won her back.

**Author's Note:**

> Citation: the play is Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare. All quotations and speeches from the play in this fic are his and not my own. I have lightly edited some of the lines for the purpose of this fic. Full text I copied it from can be found here: https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/twelfthnight/page_54/
> 
> Five second summary plot of the play is this: Viola is shipwrecked in a strange country. She dresses up as her twin brother and goes to work for the Duke of the land, and falls in love with him. However, the Duke is in love with a Lady, and he sends Viola to tell the Lady of his love. The Lady falls in love with Viola, thinking Viola is a man. Love triangle and comic confusion ensues, further complicated by the arrival of Viola’s twin brother and the pranks of a couple of gay drunk uncles. Eventually all is set to rights and Viola comes out as a woman, and she marries the Duke and her twin brother marries the Lady.
> 
> *In America this would be the second floor. This is set in Europe and European first floors are American second floors, European ground floors are American first floors.


End file.
